Monitoring tools, methods and systems for monitoring networks, in particular telecommunication networks, are known in the art.
An example of such a system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,381,306. U.S. Pat. No. 6,381,306 discloses a system on dedicated signalling links in a network all messages are captured and wherein the messages are processed into Call-Detail-Records (CDR's). The system analyses these CDR's for quality assurance monitoring. As the information is based on CDR's, the information on the network quality is not real-time. Moreover as all messages are captured and call-by-call, customer-by customer information is gathered, the system is vast and expensive and requires a huge processing capacity
Another example of such a system systems for monitoring networks is disclosed in European Patent EP 541145. EP 541145 shows a monitoring system that monitors a telecommunication network containing at least one subscriber exchange, based on call records of calls being made by subscribers via such an exchange. Such a monitoring system retrieves information from data based on samples of call records (also known as DRPC: Data-Recording-Per-Call). Typically, the monitoring system of EP 541145 is applied in large networks with a large number of subscriber exchanges. Due to the rather small sampling size per exchange (i.e., the number of sampled call records is small: 10% of all traffic), only for a large number of exchanges the statistical data derived from the call records will be reliable.
Disadvantageously, for relatively small networks such as networks for mobile telephony (with a relatively small number of subscriber exchanges), the system and method of EP 541145 will yield unreliable results. Furthermore, at an increased processor load of an exchange, the DRPC handling tasks of the exchange are reduced in favour of telephony switching tasks, which adversely reduces the sampling size even further to about 2-3% of all traffic. Moreover, as the information is based on CDR's, the information on the network quality is not real-time.
Commercially available tools for (mobile) telecommunication networks may be used for monitoring the performance (or quality) of a network to observe possible obstacles in the system. Typically, such monitoring tools are based on monitoring the network for malfunctions at the level of network elements, Usually, the tool monitors each and every network element such as exchanges, for traffic-related data (e.g., various types of alerts, the amount of traffic on routes, traffic handled by exchanges, etc.). Such action will result in the collection of vast amounts of data. Due to the size, the collected data can not be processed in real-time, and consequently the information from such data will be revealed to operations and service personnel only after a certain period of time. For the purpose of monitoring a network to detect malfunctions in real-time, such a tool from the prior art is not very useful.
Moreover, the vast amount of collected data also requires large investments regarding adequately large storage capacities and computational processing power. It is noted that the content of most of the collected data is not very useful, since the network will be functioning under normal operation conditions during most of the time.
Furthermore, since no real-time information on network quality is available, responding within a short time to cancel out possible malfunctions (or even to act proactively) is not possible, which may affect customer satisfaction: ultimately, customers may stop using the network and switch to a competitor's network.
Also, commercially available tools will only monitor network elements of the same supplier, which means that in most networks, which are multi-vendor-based, a plurality of such monitoring tools will be needed. Disadvantageously, in a multi-vendor-based network the cost of having, maintaining, using all necessary tools, and keeping them up-to-date is high.
Moreover, the training of operations and service personnel for each tool is costly also.